


and there is always music in the air

by aubadechild



Category: Code Geass
Genre: M/M, Modern AU, roadtrip au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 05:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13517676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aubadechild/pseuds/aubadechild
Summary: “Lelouch,” he says, squinting at the map. “I… I think we missed the turn.”Vignettes of a roadtrip reunion.





	and there is always music in the air

6:54pm

_Seventy_ , red needle tip hovering on the line. Suzaku counts it either side: a margin of error of approximately _godlike._ For someone intent on maintaining such a carefully constructed aura of gravitas tossed in with a healthy side of abject _I-don’t-give-a-shit_ , Lelouch’s dedication to the speed limit only adds to the allure of his character. Not that Suzaku’s complaining—and he’s already forgotten what he might have possibly been complaining about, fuck, but Lelouch’s hand is resting on his thigh like he damn well forgot it was there; placed his keys down in the wrong place one time now the whole morning’s fucked— _did you check where you last saw it?_ _Check again?_

“Lelouch,” he says, squinting at the map. “I… I think we missed the turn.”

The retraction of Lelouch’s hand is a deliberate gesture. Both hands on the wheel, now. Textbook “ten and two”, like driving class. Funny, where’d he learn to drive? These things have a way of happening in the blink of an eye; well, a decade-long blink, longer—blink nonetheless. Time swallows civilization and emotion and how your best friend learned to operate an automative vehicle. All’s well that ends well, he supposes. What’s the end?

“That can’t be right,” Lelouch tells him in a tone that’s already decided it’s wrong, absolutely, but chipper enough to soften the subtextual criticism of Suzaku’s navigation skills. “Let me see.”

“You’re _driving_.” 

_This_ is critical. _Don’t dare take your eyes off the road, Lelouch; you can’t do everything the world has to offer in a split second._ But if Lelouch mutters something about _other distractions_ it’s lost to the scream of the tires as he skids to a stop, narrowly missing a dark _something_ still breathing, bridging the double yellows as it bridges the shallows of impending death. 

Now the hood is smoking—damn these old cars, damn the hunger and peeling paint jobs that colored Suzaku’s childhood. _After your father’s accident you became the fastest on the team. Didn’t it go a little something like that?_ And Lelouch has a hand pressed against Suzaku’s chest, thrusting him back against the threadbare seat, and it goes up and down and up and down, closer and farther and closer and farther from the tip of his nose as the panic learns it has to choke. 

“That was—“

“—close.” 

“Yeah. Are you—“

“—okay? Yeah. You?”

“Fine. What was that?”

Lelouch unbuckles his seatbelt and leaps out of the car. He’s mature, right? Body over its formative years? But he still moves like stop-motion, like he’s got the right anatomy in the wrong sequence. 

Suzaku follows him into the hot hot sun, hand raised in a permanent salute. 

“It’s a cat,” Lelouch observes. “It’s still breathing.” 

“Ah,” Suzaku agrees, nodding. “Let me see.”

He kneels beside Lelouch. Heat rises from the asphalt to claw at his pale knees, but that’s a cat, alright, albeit a dubiously alive one. He rubs its belly. It hisses and draws blood. 

“Ouch!” 

Suzaku recoils, and Lelouch is there with the ghost of a hand to his back, not quite touching. There’s a laugh there somewhere, stifled. 

“Sorry”, Lelouch says. “In any case, are you wounded? There’s a first-aid kit in the truck, right?”

Laughed himself all the way solemn, didn’t he? Of course there’s a first-aid kit in the truck. But if Suzaku retained one thing from his brief stint in the military, it’s not how to assemble a gun in 30 seconds. It’s how to ignore a bullet wound. 

“Wounded?” Suzaku repeats, and, _oh, yes, blood_. He looks down at the constellation of jagged teeth embedded in his arm. “It’s nothing. I think he’s dehydrated.”

He’s almost immune to the shock of this newfound inability to read Lelouch. Almost. This one is different, though, like they’ve just met, bumped into each other at the supermarket, friend of a friend introducing them, the tantalizing sensation of a stranger turned someone you could know. He regards him that way for a moment, strangers in the supermarket, before producing a water bottle from his fanny pack— _he would_ —and gently nursing the cat with the nozzle. 

“Car’s shot,” he says. “Should we call—“

“I’m on it.”

Suzaku gets on it. 

—

_It’ll be a few hours ‘fore I can get any of my guys out there. What are a couple of city kids doin’ in the middle of nowhere anyway? Nothin’ but desert, miles of it._

—

8:43pm

Lying parallel to each other on their backs in the middle of the road, a fantasy comes knocking like the mask of death in _Amadeus._ It’s an eight-wheeler, the kind they do shows about on ice roads. The kind Suzaku’s still kind of intimidated by when passing on the freeway. And it’s coughing black smoke into the desert air, a self-contained airborne toxic event, barreling on with no regard for global warming or cats or Suzaku, lying on his back in the middle of the road—here it comes now, no stopping it. He’s not paralyzed, only daydreaming, and the driver’s distracted by a bee in the cabin or something equally plausible, and it runs him right over, right there in the middle of the road, jostles a bit as his bones protest kind of feebly before submitting to the might of its diesel-powered engine. 

Suzaku doesn’t know a lot about trucks. 

“What are you thinking about?” Lelouch asks, pinning Suzaku’s thoughts back into place. Suzaku blinks.

“Orion’s belt,” he responds. “Remember the space books we used to get from the library? It was the only constellation I found on my own. You had to show me where—“

“—the Big Dipper was. That’s supposed to be the easy one, you know. Do you remember how to find it?”

“Working back from Polaris, maybe. …Where’s that one, again?” 

Lelouch laughs. It’s soft cool sand in his throat. A barefoot on the beach at night kind of laugh. _Spare me sentiment. You can’t feel that way right now. Or else._

“Let’s go back to the car,” Lelouch says, standing up and brushing away invisible specks of dirt.

_—_

9:02pm

“Where’d you learn to drive?” Suzaku asks, because it feels important. 

“On the road,” Lelouch replies without looking up. He’s flipping through a catalogue of CDs that haven’t seen the outsides of their sleeves since Suzaku biked on training wheels. _What are you doing? We can’t listen to them anyway. The car won’t start._ Bitter in Lelouch’s direction, as though he wouldn’t have done the same.

These quarters are so close they’re practically sixteenths (Suzaku pats himself on the back for that one), and whose idea (Lelouch’s) was it to cram themselves in the back of the car along with raw chaotic energy in feline form? Their knees go sandwiched: Suzaku, Lelouch, Suzaku, Lelouch, and it’s more uncomfortable physically to maintain the polite and necessary distance between their bodies than it would be just to collide sometimes and be done with it, make nothing of a deal out of it, but they both insist on pretending Lelouch hadn’t forgotten his hand didn’t belong on Suzaku’s thigh at the beginning of this godforsaken road trip and remind him again why they aren’t kissing right now, a silent prayer summed up in a _please_ caught at the corner of his lip like a stubborn cold sore only not like that at all, obviously.

—

9:12pm

“Did you tell Nunnally where we were going?”

“I told her we’d be back tomorrow.” 

“But not where?”

“Yes, I told her where.” 

“Oh.” 

—

9:17pm

_Signal lost._

Suzaku tucks a sigh along with his phone into the front pocket of his oversized sweatshirt. 

“I think they’ve forgotten about us,” he tells Lelouch. “Wasn’t there a town in that direction?”

“I told you the map would be of use.” 

“Yeah, yeah. If worse comes to worst, can walk there tomorrow and get help.”

Lelouch shifts to return the CD case to its glove compartment abode. His inner thighs briefly trap Suzaku’s calf. The thirty seconds it takes for him to jam the case back in last too long; Suzaku turns his head to press a warm cheek against the cool window. 

“Sorry,” Lelouch says. With nothing to occupy his hands he moves them from surface to surface before they settle folded in his lap. 

“Um, it’s okay. Did you find anything good?”

“A lot of cello.” He taps his index finger. Avoid passing judgement with an objective statement. How does that make you _feel_? 

Suzaku pushes himself up to escape the oncoming crick in his back. The vehicle rocks back and forth not necessarily precariously, where would it go, but for two seconds it feels apocalyptic. 

Then Lelouch twists an impossible horror movie degree and says, “They came. Move.” And Suzaku obeys, allowing Lelouch safe passage through the passenger door. Which takes longer than it should, impeded by this conspicuous effort not to touch each other.

Suzaku watches as Lelouch discusses repair time, money with the tired mechanic outside. They left the headlights on and pointed directly at Suzaku’s truck so there’s nothing but silhouettes—the mechanic of average height and slightly above average muscle, and Lelouch, a thin abstraction of human form. He laughs a lot. Shakes his head a lot. Postures himself like apology. 

Suzaku smiles. 

—

10:38pm

“You’re all set. Well, as set as you can be without investing in a new car.”

The mechanic drags a tattered sleeve across her forehead and breathes out. 

“Much obliged,” Lelouch says cooly. He fishes for his wallet and pulls out a bill the value of which Suzaku can’t discern in the twilight, then tells her to keep the change. _How very Lelouch_. 

Dust chases the vehicle down the road and out of sight. Lelouch runs fingers through his hair and frowns. 

“We should get going.”

“It’s too late,” Suzaku informs him. “Check-in hours are over—either way, we’re sleeping in the car tonight.”

“I’m sure they can be convinced.”

“Lelouch.”

Dangling from Suzaku’s arms, the cat squirms and yowls.

—

12:01am

Sleep childs Lelouch, innocents his face angelic, almost—in Suzaku’s opinion, anyway. They folded the seats down and curled into the back with the cat in the middle again, only this time there’s a bit more room to go around. 

He won’t admit it because it’s verging on flaw but Lelouch is a heavy sleeper, always has been. Slept through false fire alarms and Sharpie mustaches, so when Suzaku’s fingers find themselves smoothing out his hair it’s fine, he won’t wake or remember, and it’s not even meaningful if it’s absent like this. Reflexive, nothing more. _Strangers with bananas in their baskets—no, pick a different fruit—_

Lelouch murmurs nonsense in his sleep. 

They had a secret language once. A language resembling others in syllable, in the fluidity of tongue, but augmented by touch as well: three fingers to the back, or two, or one, signifying different concepts. Other touch, too. A finger pressed gently to the base of the neck. _I’m here._

Suzaku wonders if Lelouch still uses the same conditioner. 

Next to him, the cat hisses at a speck of dust floating through the air.

—

12:17am

He’s decided to name it Arthur.

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written for these characters or this fandom before so excuse the various liberties taken! Don't know if this is going to remain a one-shot or have the glory of multiple chapters thrust upon it but either way it was a fun exercise in style. I haven't actually watched Code Geass all the way in order through since 2015, so please accept that as apology and excuse. As always, comments are worth more than bread to me! And I love bread a lot!（。＞ω＜）。


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